September Feature Pack: Improvements to the Megaserver System

Today marks the second week of announcements for the September Feature Pack 2014, with a focus on “improving the Guild Wars 2 experience for new and veteran players alike”. In a blog post on the official site, new improvements to the megaserver system that was released in the previous April Feature Pack have been announced. These include:

Global guilds for North America and Europe. Everything in guilds – banks, upgrades, merits etc – will be made globally accessible across all worlds, as opposed to being separate for Europe and North American server players. For existing guilds, everything will be merged in a way that means nothing will be lost during the change.

Improvements to guild missions. Open world guild missions will be seeing some changes, by making them easier to access for guild members. Players entering a map to do a guild mission will automatically reserve places on that map for other guild members to join, ensuring that guilds can more easily play together. With this release, the number of reserved places will be limited, making this change best for small to medium-sized guilds.

Closing maps – no more being left alone! With this Feature Pack, you will now receive a notification when an instance of a map is no longer accepting new players, and will eventually close when all players leave. It will give you the option to move to a new instance of the map, so that you’re able to continue playing with people around you. Should you choose to move, you’ll receive a new buff: the Volunteer’s Blessing, which increases movement speed by 15%, karma gain by 5%, and experience from kills by 10% for 10 minutes, with the movement speed buff only applying in PvE.

Language filtering. New updates will better sort players by their language preferences, so that those who can communicate with each other are more likely to be placed together. However, map instances will still not be exclusive to just one language for now.

That’s all for the megaserver announcements; if you’re after more information, you can read the full blog post about the changes here. Don’t forget to let us know what you think about these changes in the comments section below!